"I must die, my dear—I must die!" said La Foscarina, in a heart-rending voice, after a long silence, raising her face from the cushions where she had buried it, after a stormy scene of passion, in which the ardent words of her beloved had given her as much pain as pleasure. She looked at Stelio, who had thrown himself, half reclining, on a divan near the balcony, and now lay silent, his eyes half-closed, his disordered hair touched with a ray of gold from the setting sun. She realized that she was possessed by an incurable madness, spreading throughout her declining body. Lost! Lost! She was irrevocably lost!
"Die?" said her beloved, in a dreamy voice, without moving or opening his eyes, as if he were wrapped in a melancholy trance.
"Yes—die—before you hate me!"
Stelio opened his eyes quickly, raised himself erect and held up one hand, as if to prevent her from saying more.
"Ah, why do you torment yourself in this way?" he said.
He saw that she was ivory pale; her hair fell in wandering wavy locks over her cheeks; she seemed consumed by some corrosive poison; her face was full of terror and misery.
"What are you doing with me? What are we both doing?" she exclaimed in anguish.
"I love you!"
"Not as I wish, not as I have dreamed; I do not wish to be loved thus."
"But you set my heart on fire, and then madness seizes me."
"It is like the madness of hatred."
"No, no; do not say that!"
"Your fierceness makes me feel that you hate me—that you even wish to kill me."
"But you make me blind, I tell you, and then I know not what I say or do."
"What is it that maddens you so? What do you see in me?"
"Ah, I know not—I cannot tell!"
"But I know very well what it is!"
"Why do you torment yourself, I say? I love you! This is the love...."
"That condemns me! I must die of it! Call me once more by the name you gave me long ago."
"You are mine! You belong to me, and I will not lose you."
"Yes, you will lose me."
"But why? I do not understand. What wild fancy is this of yours? Does my love offend you? Do you not love me in the same way?"
His irritation and misunderstanding only aggravated her suffering. She covered her face with her hands. Her heart throbbed with hammer-like beating in her rigid breast, seeming to echo in her brain.
Presently she raised her head and looked at him with painful effort.
"I have a heart, Stelio," she said, with trembling lips, as if she were struggling with a sort of fierce timidity in order to force herself to speak those words. "I suffer from a heart, too keenly alive—oh, Stelio, alive and eager and anguished as you never will know...."
She smiled the sweet, faint smile with which she sought to disguise her suffering; hesitated a moment, then reached toward a bunch of violets, which she took and pressed close to her lips. Her eyelids drooped, her classic brow, between her dark hair and the flowers, showed its ivory-like beauty.
"You wound my heart sometimes, Stelio," she said softly, her lips still caressing the violets. "Sometimes you are cruel to it."
It seemed as if those fragrant, humble blossoms helped her to confess her sadness, to veil still more the timid reproach she had made to her beloved. She was silent; Stelio bowed his head. The logs on the hearth crackled; the autumn rain fell monotonously in the fading garden.
"I long for kindness, with a thirst that you never will understand. For that deep, true kindness, dear friend, which does not speak but which comprehends, which knows how to give all in a single look or a single movement; which is strong, sure, always armed against the evil impulse that tempts us. Do you know the sort of kindness I mean?"
Her voice, alternately strong and wavering, was so warm with inner light, was so full of revelation of a soul, that it passed through the young man's blood more like a spiritual essence than a sound.
"In you, yes, Foscarina, I know it."
He took in his own hands the slender hands that lay filled with violets on her lap; he bowed his head low over them and kissed them submissively. Then he knelt at her feet, in the same submission. The delicate perfume seemed to arouse his tenderness. During the long pause the fire and the rain continued their murmured speech.
Suddenly she asked in a clear voice:
"Do you think that I believe myself sure of you?"
"Have you not watched over my slumbers?" he replied, but in an altered tone, for he was suddenly seized by a new emotion: with her query he had seen rise before him her naked soul; and he felt that that soul had penetrated his own, and recognized his secret yearning for the belief and confidence of others in himself.
"Yes, but what does that prove?" was her reply. "Youth sleeps quietly on any pillow. You are young"—
"I love you and I have faith in you! I give myself entirely to you. You are my life's companion, and your hand is strong."
He saw the well known sadness in the lines of that loved face, and his voice trembled with tenderness.
"Kindness!" said she, caressing with light touch the hair on his temples. "You know how to be kind—you even feel a need to comfort at times. But a fault has been committed, and it calls for expiation. Once it seemed to me that for you I could do the humblest as well as the highest things; but now I feel that I can do only one thing—to go away, disappear, and leave you free with your destiny."
He interrupted her by springing to his feet and taking the loved face between his hands.
"I can do this, which love alone could not do," she said softly, turning pale, and looking at him with an expression he never had seen before.
Stelio felt that he held her soul in his hands—a living spring, infinitely beautiful and precious.
"Foscarina, Foscarina! my soul, my life! Yes, you can give me more than love—I know it well, and nothing is worth to me that which you give me; no other offer could console me for not having you beside me on my way. Believe me, believe! I have said this to you so often—don't you remember?—even before you became all my own, when the compact still held between us"—
Still holding her face between his palms, he leaned over and kissed her passionately on her lips.
This time she shivered; the glacial flood she felt at times seemed passing over her.
"No! no!" she pleaded, turning away from the young man. Dreamily she bent to gather up the scattered violets.
"The compact!" she said, after an interval of silence. "Why have we violated it?"
Stelio's eyes were fixed on the changeful splendor of the fire on the hearth, but in his open hands lingered the strange sensation, the trace of a miracle—that human face over which, through its sad pallor, had passed a wave of sublime beauty.
"Why?" the woman repeated sadly. "Ah, confess—confess that you, too, before we were seized with the blind madness of that night, felt that the higher life was about to be devastated and lost; that we must not yield if we wished to save the good that remained in us—that powerful, intoxicating thing which seemed to be the only treasure left in my life. Confess, Stelio! speak the truth! I can almost name the exact moment when the better voice spoke to you in warning. Was it not on the water, on the way home, when we had with us—Donatella?"
Before pronouncing that name she had hesitated a second, then she felt an almost physical bitterness—a bitterness that descended from her lips to the depths of her soul, as if the syllables held poison for her. She awaited his reply with suffering. "I do not know how to think about the past, Fosca," the young man replied; "moreover, I do not wish to think about it. I have lost no good attribute that belonged to me. It pleases me that your soul springs to your ripe lips, heavy with sweetness, and that your fair cheek pales when I embrace you."
"Hush, hush!" she begged. "Do not speak like that! Do not prevent me from saying what it is that troubles me! Why do you not help me?"
She shrank back among the cushions, and looked fixedly at the fire, to avoid meeting the eyes of her beloved.
"More than once I have seen a look in your eyes that has filled me with horror," she said at last, with a touch of hoarseness in her effort to speak.
Stelio started, but dared not contradict her.
"Yes, with horror," she repeated, in a clearer tone, implacable against herself, having already triumphed over her fear and regained her courage.
Both were now face to face with the truth.
She continued without faltering.
"The first time I saw it was out there in the garden—that night—you know! I understood then what it was you saw in me; all the mire over which I have walked, all the infamy that clung to my feet, all the impurity for which I have so much disgust! Ah, you could not have acknowledged the visions that kindled your thoughts that night! Your eyes were cruel and your mouth was convulsed. When you felt that you wounded my sensitiveness, you took pity on me. But then—but since then"—
Her face was covered with blushes; her voice had grown impetuous, and her eyes were brilliant.
"To have nourished for years, with all the best that was in me, a sentiment of devotion and unbounded admiration, near you or from afar, in joy and in sadness; to have accepted in the purest spirit all the consolation offered by you to mankind through your poetry, and to have awaited eagerly other gifts, even higher and more consoling; to have believed in the great force of your genius since its dawn, and never to have relaxed my watch over your ascent, and to have accompanied it with a wish that has been my morning and evening prayer all these years; to have continued, with silent fervor, the effort to give some beauty and harmony to my own spirit, that it might be more worthy to approach yours; so many times, on the stage, before an ardent audience, to have pronounced with a thrill some immortal phrase, thinking of those which perhaps one day you would communicate to mankind through my lips; to have worked without respite, to have tried always to rise to a higher and simpler form in my art, to have aspired unceasingly to perfection, fearing that nothing less would please you, that otherwise I should seem inferior to your dream; to have loved my fleeting glory only because some day it might serve yours; to have hastened, with the fervent confidence of faith, the latest of your revelations, that I might offer myself to you as the instrument of your victory before my own decay; against all and everything, to have defended this secret ideal in my soul, against all and against myself as much as against others; to have made of you my melancholy, my steadfast hope, my heroic test, the symbol of all things good, strong, and free—ah, Stelio! Stelio!"—
She paused an instant, overcome by that memory as by a new shame.
"And then to have reached that dawn—to have seen you leaving my house in that way on that horrible morning—Do you remember?"
"I was happy—happy!" cried the young man, in a stifled voice, pale and agitated.
"No, no! Do you remember? You left me as you would have left some light love, some passing fancy, after a few hours of idle pastime."
"You deceive yourself!"
"Confess! Come, speak the truth. Only through truth can we now hope to save ourselves."
"I was happy, I tell you; my whole heart expanded with joy; I dreamed, I hoped, I felt as if I were born anew."
"Yes, yes!—happy to breathe freely, to feel your youth in the breeze and the fresh air. What did you see in her who in her renunciation had so many times suffered keenly—yes, you know it well!—rather than break the vow that she had taken and borne with her in her wanderings over the earth? Tell me! what did you see in me, if you did not believe me a corrupt creature, the heroine of chance amours, the vagabond actress who in her own life, as on the stage, may belong to any man and every man?"
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